Thursday, October 21, 2004

QR Tshirts --- Remembering Minority Report

The idea is to put a 2 dimensional barcode on a tshirt( frankly the size of the barcode is a bit huge- check the pic) and this barcode will be scanned by an application running on a camera phone. The app would read the barcode that has a URL in it and launch the URL on the phones browser. Pretty neat ..eh..

This concept .. as far as i know started with semacodes.. they use DAtamatrix symbols instead of QR codes. But frankly this doesnt make a difference... the fact is to the end user what matters is whether the barcode looks pretty enough.. Most of the 2D barcodes look pretty .. atleat to me. The only notable exception being the PDF417 symbol.

What attracts me to this post is not the application idea itself. I think the idea is real cool. I personally hate entering long URLS on phones and i acknowledge the fact that BARCODES can be a very handy as data entry facilitators. I work for a firm that provides barcode scanning tech for cell phones.

There are 2 reasons that i got interested in this post.1) Look at the size of that barcode.2) Is this the first step of barcoding people ??? ( more on this later)

1) Size : I am a programmer myself and have also worked on the QR decoding mechanism. That barcode is huge ..ok .. it does eliminate the need for a additional add on lens but its just so huge.. kinda makes difficult to get a shot.

2) Does anyone remember the movie Minority Report ??? in that they had a way of tracking each person ... some how cant help but feel we are edging ever so close to that era where every body knows where u are and what u are doin... Location Based Services on cell phones will get us there pretty quickly .. but imagine this .. each person has a barcode tattoo or better yet RFID tag stuck inside ur skin somewhere .. wont that be interesting ...